By Julia Gardner
A few Thursdays ago, I walked into the Sacramento Convention Center with my backpack and violin case slung over my shoulder and my suitcase in hand. I felt both excited and unsure of what to expect during my weekend at All-State. Upon entering the building, I was met with a cacophony of music, tuning, and loud chatter. After checking in, I followed the sound to the large room and joined the pre-audition mayhem. The environment felt both completely new and extremely familiar at the same time. I was surrounded by hundreds of unfamiliar musicians from California, all of whom were practicing for their auditions—a ritual I was quite familiar with.
After seating auditions and dinner, I gathered with my fellow String Orchestra members and attended our first rehearsal. The first piece we rehearsed was the fourth movement of Sinfonietta No. 2 by Coleridge Taylor Perkinson. Although
everyone was talented, we struggled to play together as an ensemble as we adjusted to each other’s sound and the conductor. After our discordant first notes, it was hard for me to believe that our three pieces would be ready in time for the concert with only three days of rehearsal.
Later that night, after a group meeting and what felt like years of waiting around, we finally met our roommates and checked into our hotel rooms. Two of my roommates were people I had never met before, and the third was a GSYO bassist whom I had met briefly at Symphony Retreat last summer. There were two double beds and a bathroom with a single sink for the four of us to share. Thankfully, we were lucky enough to have a corner room with slightly more space than the other hotel rooms. Our semi-tight accommodations (and 2:30 AM conversations) certainly helped us get to know each other during our weekend at All-State.
The next morning, we had breakfast before the sun came up so that we could make it to our 8 AM soundcheck at Memorial Auditorium. Our daily schedule left little free time aside from meals, as we were always at rehearsals or concerts. However, after a thirty-minute rehearsal during which we were all still half-asleep, we were given free time to explore the Exhibition Hall. With some friends from GSYO, I walked from booth to booth, collecting free pencils and stickers while nodding politely as exhibitors enthusiastically shared products, most of which I had no use for but found interesting nonetheless. I am quite proud of the fact that I successfully made a sound on a trumpet, which was very exciting to me as a violinist with no brass experience.
Because there were so many people at the conference, I noticed that most stuck with their pre-existing friend groups. While many people spent time with friends from school, others spent time with friends from their youth orchestras. At first, this dynamic worried me, as I was the only musician from my school, but I still met a few new people and strengthened my GSYO friendships.
After the Exhibition Hall, we went straight to rehearsal. Our rehearsals were three hours long with a short break in the middle, and we had two rehearsals per day. We spent a lot of time isolating challenging passages in the music and rehearsing them at a slow tempo. Sometimes, we would play the same set of measures over and over again for what felt like hours. It was a tedious process, but it proved effective and incredibly satisfying as everything came together note by note. By the end of each rehearsal, we sounded noticeably better than we did three hours prior. Our conductor also stressed the importance of having fun when we played. I vividly remember when, during one of our final rehearsals, our conductor made us stand up and dance while we played an arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s Fuga y Misterio. Despite our exhaustion brought on by two nights of limited sleep, we found joy and humor (and a little bit of awkwardness) in the rehearsal technique, creating a core memory to laugh about in the future.
That evening, we attended the All-State jazz ensembles’ concert. We all sat with our friends and watched (or slept through) the performance. When the concert ended, we waited for an hour to be dismissed to the hotel and passed the time by doing The Wave across the balcony, as if we were in a stadium.
Saturday, like the other days at All-State, was filled with many hours of rehearsal. With our performance the next morning, we focused on polishing rough spots and ensuring that our pieces would be ready for the concert. Saturday night was the Symphony Orchestra and Wind Symphony concert. Several GSYO musicians were involved in these performances, and it was fun to hear what they had accomplished during the past few days of rehearsal.
The next morning was my final day at All-State and also the day of our concert. After another early breakfast, we brought our instruments to Memorial Auditorium and took our seats in the audience to watch the middle school orchestras’ concerts before ours. When it was our turn to perform, everyone’s exhaustion seemed to disappear, replaced by a surge of adrenaline. Once we began playing, I was shocked by how good our orchestra sounded. We went from struggling to even play at the same tempo to performing our music with precision, emotion, energy, and even a little bit of choreography in the bass section. Perhaps it took me so long to recognize our success because of my exhaustion, or maybe we really did improve overnight, but I felt incredibly proud of what we were able to put together in just a few days. As the final glissando of Piazzolla rang out, I realized that this concert was truly the perfect finale to my time at All-State.
